Jake Kappus.comCertified Geek, Dad, MMA fan, and ocassional Pro Wrestler

I’ve all but given up on the great state of Wisconsin.  Don’t get me wrong, this is my home and I love this state, I really do.  From the good ‘ol Green Bay Packers, to Leinenkugels beer, to the beautiful scenery north of highway 29, I can’t think of a better place to live and raise a family in.

But there are no jobs here!

The Wausau area seemed to be booming about four or five years ago.  Industry was growing and I was busy as an IT consultant could be.  Every consulting firm in the area wanted a piece of this area.  Heartland moved in, CDW was a strong presence already, and even non-local players like Inacom, Tushaus, Logicalis, and Camera Corner all had or was attempting to make a presence here.  Me and my colleagues were doing all we could to fight off the recruiting calls from all of these companies and more, trying to build a customer base from our already existing relationships in the area.

Then sometime in about early 2009 it just died.  Blame the economy, blame competition, blame Bush, blame Obama, blame someone.  But the Wausau market just dried up.  Big industries like Greenheck, Wausau Window and Wall, Footlocker stopped hiring, laid off workers and stopped doing upgrades or replacements with consultants like me.  IT budgets froze, and so did the local consulting market.  Market values for a network administrator dropped along with those budgets.

I once interviewed with a great real estate investment firm in Northern Wisconsin.  They had been one of my best customers for years.  I watched them start out in a small office with 10 people and turn into a company with over 100 employees in six states.  Their financials were very very good.  They were a very liquid company with little to no debt and millions in profit every year since they started.  Their infrastructure had grown out of their small broom closet into over 20 servers, hub and spoke WAN to their 6 locations, Exchange, Cisco Wireless, Voice and Firewalls.  I had implemented Microsoft OCS  and an advanced Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Accounting system.  When it came time to hire a network admin to manage all of this, they called me first.  I was of course open to the idea of managing this infrastructure due to my great relationship with them and well, I had built most of this environment almost from the ground up.  It was a perfect fit.  Then we talked money.  Turns out they wanted to pay only about 40K per year to manage all of this.  Their actual job description and newspaper ad specifically required the CCNA, CCVP, MCSE, MCTS: OCS and a CWNA certifications for the position with a minimum of 5 years experience, all for 40K.  There was nothing I could do but shake my head and wish them luck.   They ended up with an entry level guy who had none of these certifications and/or experience, and I think they may be going out of business as of this writing.

With no major projects in the pipeline, the big non-local firms all either pulled out of Wausau or dramatically reduced their staff and footprint on the area.  Heartland, CDW, and RMM Solutions are prime examples of that.  I unfortunately worked for all three of them and saw it all first hand.  I was lucky with CDW and got out before things got crazy there, but not so lucky with Heartland and RMM.  I don’t blame either of them for the bloodletting (though their methods and communications could have been done with a little more morality in my honest opinion), but when the area does again pick up some steam, these firms will again experience difficulty finding advanced talent to design and implement these solutions.

So what’s a senior level Cisco/Microsoft/VMWare guy making good money as a consultant to do?  No one is hiring, and no one is paying the salaries that we have worked so hard to advance to. Sure, there is Green Bay, the Fox Valley and Milwaukee or Madison.  But what’s to say that the market is any better over there?  I haven’t seen any improvement in those cities either.  Madison probably is the best of the bunch.  Ministry, Marshfield Clinic and Aspirus are hiring, if you like working for lower pay and high blood pressure.  There’s a reason they have such good medical benefits!  So I’m stuck flying around the world doing Exchange and Active Directory migrations with a Quest vendor.  Not exactly the best scenario for a family of eight.

So, after a lot of discussions with my family and friends, we’ve decided to make our way back to Minnesota.  I just feel that if something were to happen in my current position, I have a better chance of landing something in the Minneapolis/St Paul area than anywhere in Wisconsin.  I never again want to experience the feeling of working your tail off and being let go due to something completely out of your control, and then having no options other than being a road warrior or putting my tail between my legs and working at one of the hospitals.   I want that control again over my career and be able to get back on the ladder towards my goals.  Moving to a better market will be the first step.

Kaylee and I will head out first with the family following after the next school year.  On a personal note, this has been such a difficult year for us on so many levels.  The job situation was just a small sliver of what was a horrible, horrible 2010.  Here’s looking at 2011 and things going positive for us again. 1/1/11 can not come fast enough for us.

Finally, I promise to never, ever become or let my children become Vikings fans.  No matter how many former Packers migrate over here to this clusterfuck of a football team.  The Twins, Gophers and Wild are a different story though. 

Update Rollup 1 for Exchange 2010 SP1 is out.  I haven’t had a chance to put this in my lab yet, so I can’t say much about it.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=2407028

Looks like only a few fixes in this one.

• 2028967 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028967/ ) Event ID 3022 is logged and you still cannot replicate a public folder from one Exchange Server 2010 server to another
• 2251610 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2251610/ ) The email address of a user is updated unexpectedly after you run the Update-Recipient cmdlet on an Exchange Server 2010 server
• 978292 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978292/ ) An IMAP4 client cannot send an email message that has a large attachment in a mixed Exchange Server 2010 and Exchange Server 2003 environment
• 982004 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982004/ ) Exchange Server 2010 users cannot access the public folder
• 983549 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983549/ ) Exchange Server 2010 removes the sender’s email address from the recipient list in a redirected email message
• 983492 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/983492/ ) You cannot view updated content of an Exchange Server 2010 public folder

Let me know if you experience any issues with it.

As a consultant, I sit on a lot conference calls, long troubleshooting calls and calls to vendors for different things.   I pay for my own cell phone so using hours upon hours on a cell phone is both uncomfortable and kills the minutes therefore making it expensive as hell.  I needed to come up with a solution where I could make incoming and outgoing calls using my trusty internet connection without subscribing to a VOIP provider or implementing Cisco voice or Lync/OCS, in other words…free.

Enter Google Voice and SipGate.  If you have Google Voice already, you’re half way there.  If not, go to voice.google.com and get your number while you still can.  Then go to SipGate (www.sipgate.com) and open an account there.  Take whatever number they give you.  Doesn’t matter because you’ll be using your Google Voice number for everything.

Then either use their SipGate softphone or get X-Lite and configure it per SipGate’s instructions at the “Sip Credentials” link on your settings page.  It should connect right away.  Run a quick test from the page to ensure you are receiving inbound calls.

Take your phone number SipGate gave you and go back to Google Voice.   Click settings and phones.  Add the new phone and number.  The location can be anywhere but Gizmo.  Gizmo5 is Google’s SIP carrier, but I’ve never had good luck getting them to work consistently to be honest.

You will need to verify the new phone, click dial when it pops up and enter the verification code.

At this point, you should be in business.  Just fire up Google Voice, enter the number you want to dial under Call and it will dial your softphone, you answer, then it dials the call outbound for you.  With SipGate it worked flawlessly.

But here’s where it got cool.  I found this little app called Google Voice Desktop Application, created by the R. Stoeber group out of Park City Utah.  It’s basically an Adobe AIR app that will allow you to use Google Voice from your desktop.  No more having to pull up a browser and go to the page to dial.  It’s right on your desktop.  Very cool stuff.  Works great even on Windows 7 64bit systems.

I hit call and it dials my x-lite phone, I answer, and it dials out.  Free incoming and outgoing calls to the world.  Freakin’ sweet!  Sure, it takes about five clicks and two different applications to get the call out, but it’s free and it works!

There are days when being a geek is good….

Oh by the way…disclaimer…  I don’t know the boys at R.Stoeber Group, I’m not endorsing their product, just showing you that I use it and works.  If it doesn’t work, or if you break something while installing it, it’s not my fault.  Contact them if you have issues.  Cool?

I’m a little slow with the news lately, but I just found out that Microsoft OCS is now Microsoft Lync.  What’s also new is that the Release Candidate is now out as well!!

Reference documentation can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da9fa26-e032-4dcf-b487-da916ddc508f

Download the bits here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff808407.aspx

Time to start playing in the lab!  Too bad I wasn’t working for a partner that had an actual relationship with Microsoft where I could have been playing with it sooner.   More on that later…

I passed 70-662 and 70-663 last week to earn the MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator certification for Exchange 2010.

Now what?

I’m going to be sitting the Exchange 2010 exams in the next week or so.  I’m feeling pretty good after taking the practice tests.  Wish me luck!

Wow…I just remembered that I promised to post more from TechEd.  Well, as you can see, my only post was from somewhere on Bourbon Street and that’s pretty much all I remember.  OK, maybe not.  I swear I did make it to every session on my list.    I guess life got in the way that week, but for the better.  Seems that Melissa and I needed that week in New Orleans much worse than we thought.  It’s amazing that too much alcohol, Bourbon Street debauchery and honesty can actually repair a relationship in some cases.

Seems like my Cisco days are just about over.  I can be a Microsoft geek again soon. 

I’ve installed FCS before and it was a major pain in the ass.  The pre-reqs weren’t documented well and it took a while to get SQL to play nice and eventually get Forefront installed.  I really just attributed it to my own lack of experience with it.

I’m back installing Forefront again and I’m going to say it again.  It’s a pain in the ass to install.  Great anti-virus product on the front end, but damn it makes you want to throw your laptop across the room and find a sledgehammer to smash the server into pieces ala the Office Space printer on the backend.  First I ran into the msiexec.exe access is denied error which was apparently fixed by installing the .NET 1.1 Framework.  Really?  The documentation calls for .NET 2.0 or higher.   Two days later after fighting through one KBXXXX article after another, it’s installed.

Seriously, if you want people to buy this…make the install a little bit easier.  If Symantec can do it, why can’t you, Microsoft?

Dear Microsoft, If you are going to host TechEd in a drinking city with a hurricane problem, please don’t start activities anytime before noon.

I have an ASA 5510-BUN-K9 with an unlimited license for sale. It has some damage to the faceplate and the corners but boots and works perfectly. Make me an offer.